But sometimes I just want to read the content, not get distracted by anything else.

Two suggestions for future releases.

1) Can you reprint at least the top 3-5 comments on those topics on hackers News? (not sure how you are going to do that without making a lot of people mad). Also on the PDF version, can you have a clickable link to the discussion on the hacker news?

2) One of the biggest reasons I am turned off from reading magazines is the annoying ads all over the place including in-between the content. Since you are going to rely on ad, may I suggest that you try to avoid ads on the same page, where there is content? I stopped reading Wired Magazine, just because of this reason.

Good luck. Looks good.

I think the reason he did not include comments is the lack of a way of contacting people on HN. Very few people include an email address in their profile.

HN could help him a lot by adding a "email me" link on the profile page - not an email address, but a forwarder, HN will send the email.

I don't think spam would be much of a problem since you would need to be a registered user to send an email, and you could require 3 karma or something.

Maybe only show emails to users with 25 karma or more?

In any case, what they do is they have a few pages in the printed edition where they just reprint interesting comments from the online discussion. The comments are shown as thought bubbles next to user icons from the online community, and they are selected such that they make sense standalone without the original article text. These pages are surprisingly fun to browse, and they also work as an ad for the online portion of the magazine and the discussions taking place there.

It makes me think that the limitations of printed material, both the delay and content limits (# of pages) is really not a big deal when it comes to the stuff we enjoy here on HN. In fact, it really was nice to only have a small number of articles in front of me so I didn't get distracted with all the noise.

Lastly, I thought not having comments would be huge... but I didn't think about that once as I was reading the PDF. I guess the context of how you consume something defines what you expect.

Projects like these make a good case for open-content licenses like Creative Commons' and the GNU Free Documentation License. If all the articles included in the magazine used the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (which allows content to be reused as long as any modified versions are available under the same terms), Lim could have saved countless hours by not having to explicitly ask permission for each piece he included.

Lim, if you're listening, perhaps you would consider encouraging the people you talk to to license their works under a Creative Commons license. This could make things a lot easier the next time around if you pull material from the same blogs, etc.

Given that you literally gain nothing by preventing this use -- I'm assuming you're not fielding other offers for usage of your HN posts -- I don't see why you'd care. I realize this is a common gut reaction, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you don't like it more explicitly.

If you genuinely prefer a less-restrictive license, more power to you. But the argument that people should license their work under a CC license to make things easier for publishers is a bit like my boss saying "Why don't you just work for free so I don't have to go through the hassle of having to pay you?"

Now I license my content as CC-BY-SA. Recently a for-profit blog took some graphs from a post I wrote and added context in German. This was totally within the lines of the license, and I thought it was pretty cool that people in Germany were now able to benefit from my work.

But the contributors like pg are already creating and publishing these articles for free. Most of them benefit only indirectly from their writing, and that benefit is increased, not decreased, when the writing is distributed to more readers.

I suppose it's less about wanting to get paid for my work as much as it is wanting to be able to control whether or not I get paid for my work. If I think that somebody has a valid reason to use my blog posts, then I might let them. But I do want them to get my permission first. Maybe some people are comfortable with giving anyone and everyone the ability to use their writings in whatever commercial environment they want to. I personally am not.

...but regardless "It'll make the publishers' lives easier!" isn't a very convincing argument to me. :-)

If you intend to be a writer, you might think about things a little differently. As a given, you'll want to get paid for what you write, probably by being commissioned by a magazine for a piece or by working as a staff writer. In this case, you probably feel squeamish about giving your work away for free since you're sometimes able to make money off it.

If you're already willing to publish a piece for free on your blog, it seems unlikely that you would later be able to sell it to a magazine. Magazines seem to like original content, and (with the exception of Hacker Monthly) wouldn't want to republish something already out there.

A few people have experimented with republishing their blogs as books. The two that come to mind are PG's Hackers and Painters (his essays weren't exactly a blog, but they're pretty similar in that they're regularly updated freely accessible online content) and Scott Adams' Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. From what I've gathered, both of these had limited success, making this strategy of generating income from blog content seem rather unfeasible.

The only remaining strategy for making money off your blog is ads. This has certainly been proven to work, although only for blogs in the top one percent or so in terms of readership. Boing Boing, the most read blog on the web, licenses it's content under a Creative Commons license, and it doesn't seem to have hurt it much. XKCD also releases all its content under a CC license. (They both use the Attribution-Non Commercial license, which does raise some questions about what would happen if they removed the non commercial clause.)

So, if you're not in the top one percent of blogs, it seems like you don't have much to loose by giving your content away, and having it available in as many places as possible. You can turn the notoriety you gain from people listening to your thoughts and ideas into something profitable if you like, such as promotion for contract work, publicity for a book you write, or even starting a startup incubator. Don't get caught up in the details of the value of a few blog posts, think big picture.

Ah, the perils of framing!

I am tired of all these people raining on link-baiting.

So what if he wants to phrase his titles like that? It makes much sense, because that's how attention is grabbed.

Without those titles, I know I would have missed many wonderful articles.

Either way, keep up the good work!

I hope somebody finds a publisher in Europe. I did a fast search, and it looks like there aren't a lot (or any) services like MagCloud here in Europe.

At least I got some hopeful bits from the MagCloud FAQ:

The MagCloud team is working hard on expanding to other European and Asia Pacific countries

Let's hope that working hard means they'll start to ship to other European countries in the next few weeks ;)

I'd love to see the magazine perfect bound rather than saddle stitch, too.

MagCloud state that they plan to expand, but we don't know how long it will take.

It's a great idea, very well pulled off!

Everyone else: Live in the Netherlands or the surrounding area? Want a hard-copy of Hacker Monthly but can't get it because they don't ship to mainland Europe? Willing to have an impromptu meet-up in Amsterdam to get hold of your copy of Hacker Monthly?

I do, and I still have a UK address that I visit semi-regularly. I'm sending my copy there. Email me if you're interested (see my profile). Depending on the interest (up to a point, obviously) I'm willing to bring them over and sort this out.

However, I agree with you. They can make it easier. It's a good idea to use GEO-IP location to track the country and let users know right away.

I start on this page: http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/88360 I click Buy Issue. I click Sign Up Now. Still haven't seen it. Even on the magcloud.com homepage I don't see it. Maybe I'm crazy/blind.

The site has my IP address this whole time and could use it.

Visitors from outside the US will feel my pain on this one - it is a common and maddening frustration.

People elsewhere have suggested as a solution btw: http://www.shipito.com/

Anyway I've had dinner and can now speak calmly. The feature that I described (a preemptive suggestion of the inability to ship to the visitor's country) is not common on the web. In fact most online retailers really suck at it. I still haven't found a decent solution for quickly checking whether Amazon items can be shipped to me without adding to cart and proceeding to checkout. However, it would be a welcome feature for most online retailers, and would definitely stop visitor's like myself from getting a nasty first impression.

I guess it's not implemented well because, by definition, if I'm outside your shipping area than I'm outside your target market. However you can see how this is short sighted, and keeping me happy might be a good idea for the future.

So those are my $0.02 on the issue. I guess this is what happens when a company makes me angry ten minutes before dinner :D

Otherwise, well done on Issue 1. Looks great.

I'm happy to share the proofreading/editing burden with ekpyrotic or do a pass before or after ekpyrotic does, if that would be helpful (http://rdela.com has an email link at the bottom).

I wish that, somehow, an article of new content could perhaps be in each issue. If there were a magazine like this with original content, or at least half original... I don't even know how to express how overjoyed I'd be.

Like someone in this thread put, "the old Wired". But really, much better.

Keep up the amazing work, please! And let us know if you're interested in help.

I had hoped it would include the discussion threads from that too.

Q. Will you include the comments of Hacker News?

A. Of course. Similar to the articles, I will email the original commenters for permission. Oh, if you are a regular commenter in Hacker News, pretty please, put your contact information in your profile (a lot of the members just leave it empty), that would save me a lot of fuss trying to look for your email around the web. [ed: that means you ThomPete]

That will come in #2, hopefully.

In case I didnt say before: you're welcome to use any of mine with attribution (if you want to edit long ones a quick email would be appreciated).

I do think it's going to need comments to be worth while. I have just bought a copy of the first issue anyway though :)

Looks great, first off, really nice design. I'm guessing you are a designer?

The only downside for me was the lack of editing... it's key to producing a magazine and there were places where it was obvious. As an example; some of the pieces were just too long and needed additional proof reading.

Other thoughts? Obviously comments would be neat (but I know your working on that).

Editorial would be quite interesting to have. Maybe ask one or two HN members each month to write custom editorials on big topics or just in general.

EDIT: if you need a hand editing drop me a mail.

It makes things a lot more readable and if you have a good editor it can mean the difference between good content and great content :)

(take the first article; it could have benefited from some slicing/reorganizing, but most of all from good sectioning (particularly headed sections)

You would be surprised how much can be cut without losing content or the style of the piece.

Not sure if there's a better way to do it.

<a href="URL_TO_PDF" onclick="registerConversion()">Download</a>

You can put a minor 500 ms pause so that event gets registered.

     $("a.magcloud").click(function() { 
       mpmetrics.track('purchase', {'issue': '#1'}); 
       self.delay(500);
       return true; 
     });

For someone who claims no prior knowledge of print you've created something that looks pretty good, chunky selection of articles as well.

I noticed something interesting, I recognized some of the articles, but in this format I read them more thoroughly. It's as if content on the web is more "disposable", whereas in printed form it feels more permanent, and you feel obligated to give it more time - as another poster said, less distracted by the comments.

Might I suggest using a different monospace font though? I found the code font you used in JWZ's article to be much less readable than my typical code window (e.g. Consolas).

I am stuck relying on google cache and cannot see the pdf. Any tips?

wget http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --14:52:00-- http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf => `hackermonthly-issue1.pdf' Resolving hackermonthly.com... failed: Name or service not known.

ping hackermonthly.com ping: unknown host hackermonthly.com

I'm not seeing DNS for hackermonthly.com on my home ADSL2 connection (via Be Broadband), but my colo box (hosted by Bytemark) is resolving it fine. As I'm in the UK, this is definitely not Rogers in Canada -- it's some kind of DNS screw-up.

NB: It resolved okay via Be about 10 hours ago (10am BST) when I grabbed a copy this morning. I suspect something's come adrift since then.

curl http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --header 'HOST: hackermonthly.com' > hackermonthly-issue1.pdf

curl -O http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --header 'HOST: hackermonthly.com'

to achieve the same result

We can make it available for non-epub devices like the Kindle and Blackberry, as well as the iPad, Nook, sony Reader, Android, etc.

You can continue to give it away free, or a charge a fee for it, and we're accessible from any country.

I ended up buying GoodReader for iPad (0.99c) so I could read the magazine in the form it was intended to look on paper. Recommended.

I've been hoping someone would do this for a while now, and I'm glad to see that it looks very well done.

I'm a developer for MagCloud, so I'm really interested in any feedback you might have so far. Feedback from everyone else is welcome too!

I'm looking forward to future issues! If you care to share, it would be nice to hear some stats to see how much attention the magazine is getting.

I'm speaking on my own behalf, of course, not MagCloud's, but I will pass this link on to everyone else on the team.

I just purchased a copy of Hacker Monthly and have a few usability comments the checkout process!

From the cart page I clicked "Sign up Now" (which could be a tad more visible) and then chose to select an address from my address book. It was of course empty so I chose the add address link. So far so good but here's where I ran into problems.

1) MagCloud only ships to three countries, but the country dropdown contains the whole ISO list... not necessary.

2) After adding my address it returned me to the address book. There it wasn't immediately clear how to select my new entry as the shipping address. (See Amazon for a clearer approach.)

3) Once my address was selected and populated into the checkout form I ran into the address validation engine:

I'm in the USA so I don't know how you're doing it with the others but the address correction was overly aggressive and the error messages were unhelpful. Take a look at some other sites that attempt to normalize addresses. On my first try it (correctly) had a problem with my submission but the error wasn't that helpful: "Multiple addresses were found for the information you entered, and no default exists. This order would be shipped by the USPS, and it does not recognize the address you entered. Please try to correct the address." Could it offer those choices or be more specific about the ambiguous fields?

4) The address in my address book wasn't updated with the corrections made to the address during the checkout process.

5) There is no way to delete or edit an existing address.

6) This is more of a aesthetic issue but when it corrects the address it UPPERCASES everything (the way the USPS likes it) however it didn't cap address line 2 nor the name. Those could be UPPERCASED too for consistency.

7) The font color of unfocused fields seems a bit light - almost looks disabled.

8) Clicking Checkout/Sign In/Sign Up should also apply coupon on cart page.

9) The error messages could be closer to the form fields.

All-in-all I like the design and layout of the site though!

11) Ditto with magazines in black and white with a lower cost per page.

12) A break-down of the pricing with an example would be great.

13) Your Father's Day "banner" has some CSS wrong in Opera: http://img228.imageshack.us/i/51623194.png/. Notice how the coupon code continues to the next line and covers the user name (had I not removed it).

There's just no reason why we shouldn't have editors and publishers whose job it is to find good writing on the web and mark it up decently for reading. It is certainly a service I'd pay for. Already I spot several articles that I didn't see when they appeared on HN in the first place.

Hence, I'm using SHIPITO (http://shipito.com). They seemed to be the cheapest and quite reliable (has a support forum).

I am not sure how mag cloud works (print on demand or do they actually create the "plates" for offset printing and thus unique issues are not doable?) - but if it is print on demand could you not have a button which says "Add comments to this issue" which would collate and generate the pdf then and there by the users own interaction thus side-stepping the legal issues?

A surprising thing: I use a lot of links and footnotes, which don't translate well to print. If writing for both print and web, I think my style would change quite a bit, eg taking the time to paraphrase a source rather than just linking to it.

So are there plans to sell this mag through bookstores like B&N or Borders? I'd like to pick up a copy of the real mag (I just bought issue #1 online - would be nice to be able to snag locally though).

Also, does anyone have info on how often they plan to publish? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Is there a yearly subscription price and anywhere to sign-up? I only see the option to buy one issue right now.

I haven't read the entire thing yet, but reading Eric Davis's article was more than worth it. I felt like I got a free therapy session.

Keep up the good work.

Feedback: I noticed some small typos in the "SR-71" with missing dots at sentence endings. Another thing was that the contents page shows "2 Steps to Becoming a Great Developer" and "This is why I sell beer" in reversed order.

The positive is that it looks professional and was a pleasure reading! Big thumbs up! :)

Also, interesting that magcloud still remains very connected to HP. It's paypal address is actually magcloud@hp.com

Not for me though, I remembered 90% of the articles included in the issue and rereading them didn't really add much value.

This is definitely something I want to sit down with and soak in.

;)

Keep Up the good work!

If you need help just pm!!

Beautiful, though.

I think you've messed up the title's formatting a bit in the jwz iPhone article tho.

Wait... they don't ship to Poland. Ouch

God I LOVE HN!!!

Looks great... i printed it out in b&w I'm afraid :(